Canada's growth

This is Joseph

There is a long conversation right now on whether Canada is broken or if Canada is not a serious country. I was talking about this with Mark and he was skeptical so I decided to lay out the numbers. One item in evidence is long term GDP change compared to the USA and Australia.

Here are some numbers: 

Canada (Year, GDP,  GDP per capita, population)

1990 $593.93B $21,448      28,347,641

2021 $1,988.34B $51,988      38,155,012

Australia (Year, GDP,  GDP per capita, population)

1990 $311.43B     $18,250    17,048,003

2021 $1,552.67B     $60,443    25,921,089

USA (Year, GDP,  GDP per capita, population)

1990 $5,963.14B $23,889    248,083,732

2021 $23,315.08B $70,249    336,997,624

The striking comparison over the past 30 years is Australia. Australia had a 52% increase in population and managed to jump ahead in per capita income despite being behind when I graduated high school. Yes, in the old days when the mighty cave person hunted the fierce dinosaur, Canadians were richer than Australians. 

Australia went from 52% of the GDP of Canada to 78% of the GDP of Canada over the next 31 years. Canada grew 35% in population, an easier pace to sustain, and still managed to have slower growth in both total and per capita GDP. The ability to boost per capita GDP at the same time as rapid population growth is a really neat trick if you can manage it. 

The USA isn't a great comparator, either. At the start of this time period the USA was 11% richer per capita, while at the end it was 35% richer per capita. US GDP grew 391% despite the same % population growth as Canada, while Canada managed 335%. That gap is the source of the growing divide in per capita income.

More recently, it looks like Canada is adopting a high immigration strategy. Canada's strategy looks a lot like the Australian plan. Obviously the Australians are doing something right and it would be smart to emulate them. But the worry is that we are slowly losing ground and that speeding up immigration in a time of relative decline compared to peer nations makes it harder to build social consensus. A brisk relative increase in wealth is a great way to sustain public support for high immigration  -- people enjoy becoming more affluent. It remains to be see if Canada can turn this sluggish growth trajectory around and make this new plan work.

That's the real test as to whether we are still functional.  

P.S. The best follow-up to the broken versus serious is here. The inspiration is here. 

The inspiration included New Zealand which seems designed to make Canadians sad with 550% growth in GDP over the same time period and an increase from 64% of Canada's per capita GDP to 94% with similar population growth to Australia:

New Zealand (Year, GDP,  GDP per capita, population)

1990 $45.50B         $13,663        5,129,727

2021 $249.89B $48,781        3,397,389

The huge immigration surge of the late Trudeau administration (really the last few years) has not really led to the sort of boom that the pacific part of the Anglosphere are experiencing. The UK is hard because of Brexit. 

Another interesting factor is child-bearing. Canada's most recent year (2020) is 1.4 children per woman despite a large immigrant population. In contrast, it's peers are all 1.6 (Australia, NZ, and the US). So it has to struggle harder against the demographic headwinds. Canada is closer to Japan (1.3) than to the US (1.6).